Sunday, February 26, 2012 - Today we leave Portugal for Madrid. Our drive will be about 500km and the route we’re taking will take us easterly across the central part of Portugal. We retrace our route south for about 80 km before we head due east for Madrid several hundred km away.
The route takes us through areas with villages. Not really big cities, but it seems that there are houses/villages interspersed along the way with not a lot of space with not settlements. We do come across agricultural areas for grain and cattle. We are in the mountains now, and as we near the Spanish border the topography changes to more rugged landscape and looks like lots of granite and scrub verses the forested areas we had seen about an hour earlier. In Portugal we had left sea level, and we climb to a high of 880 m before we get to Spain. It seems hazy today, so our pictures are less clear of this area than we would like.
Once we entered Spain, again the topography changed almost immediately, here we see lots of cattle grazing amongst partially treed fields. The land definitely flattens out and the elevation in this area is about 800 m above sea level. The soil changes to red color with farming of some crops, and then changes back to cattle ranching for the most part. There are likely hogs too and some of the holdings are much larger. We don’t see nearly as much sheep in this area. This is clearly cattle country, and although Minnesota may have Babe the Blue Ox, this part of Spain has Toro the black bull.
We arrive in Madrid at this week’s apt by 3:15.
Virginia is there to let us in, she caretakes for the owner. We are in the north part of Madrid. It was really hard to find an apt that had parking for our vehicle, so we were happy to find this place. She leads Mark over to where the underground parking is located and after negotiating the entranceway, it is fairly easy to park relative to some places in Rome and Athens (although this parking lot did remind us a bit of the one in downtown Rome). We won’t be using the vehicle this week, instead, we’ll use the public transportation.
T and M went for a walk around 4:30 to check out the neighborhood, J said he just wanted to chill. We walked over to the square to find the supermarket (although as its Sunday its closed) and check out the possible eatery for a meal out. There are some people sitting out on the café terraces and some kids playing in the play area. We turned a corner to leave the square and come face to face with a large crowd of people. There are police on the street and double-decker buses with people and flags waving and music playing. We see signs about the Dominican Republic and throngs of people now begin to file into the square we just came out of. Amazing, we just stand against a wall of a building and watch the action for 10 min or so. We decide to retrace our steps and find a seat at a café and have a drink and see what’s up. It turns out it celebration of the Dominican Republic day and the place is crawling with people of this nationality. The locals are having a great time, there are some individuals dressed in Carnaval costumes. We have a great time watching the people, and listening to some music that finally begins to be played after all the speeches. It’s 9:30 and we can still hear the music being played. Our apt. is located not far off of the square.
Monday, February 27, 2012 – Today we explore the neighborhood and find that easily within a 5 min. walk there are a half a dozen cafés for our morning coffee. There is a butcher, bakery, fruit and vegetable shop as well as a well-stocked grocery store. We spend time going to each to get some groceries for the next few days.
While J is doing homework, we go for a walk a couple of hours to check out what’s around the area. We stop at the metro and purchase 10 trip passes for each of us for our adventures this week. The nearest metro stop is less than a 5 minute walk away, and the key bus stop is not much further. It’s beautiful and warm today, so we end up walking around in shirtsleeves this afternoon. Most of the locals are not. It’s a bustling neighborhood and we walk quite a distance and time. All in all a laid back day.
We have another great dinner courtesy of T, and as this week we do not have satellite TV we just put the TV on music channel we find listen to some tunes, and J watches some of our movies.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012 – After our normal morning routine, except for J doing homework, he stayed up late again so he slept in until after 10:30, so that will come later. We have decided that as Madrid has some great art opportunities, this week we will take some of them in. Today we go to the Prado Museum. The bus station is just over 5 min. from the apt and we arrive to see our bus is there already. We follow the routines of some locals to know what to do about our pass once we enter the bus. We travel down one of the main boulevards of this section of the city. It is very wide with trees alongside of it, similar to what we saw in Barcelona. Eventually it divides even further so there is a treed walk promenade down the centre of the thoroughfare for pedestrians to use. This adds to the beauty of the place, instead of a straight 6 – 8 lane roadway.
Along the way we see Estadio Santiago Bernbeu – home of Real Madrid soccer, seats over 85000 people. No game this week unfortunately! There are a number of well-preserved and very large government buildings as well. Every so many blocks, there is a fountain or statue. We enjoy our ride down Paseo della Castellana giving us a tour of this busy part of Madrid which takes about 20 minutes.
The Prado Museum is reputed to have one of the largest collections in Europe, with over 7000 pieces. Not everything is on display due to limitations of space. What is on display is wonderful and featured Spanish, Italian, Flemish, French, German and British artists. Some names are Goya, Velazquez, Reuben, Rembrandt and Raphael. Each of us had our favorites and some pieces were not so. It was a great way to spend time. We viewed Velazquez’s most famous piece, Les Mineras, and even got to see a copy of the Mona Lisa – J liked that the best. It was a very close copy of the original. After several hours, J had his fill and our feet were telling us it was time for a break.
We left the museum and enjoyed a walk around the beautiful buildings and grounds. J being influenced by all the masterpieces he saw, decided to show us a few of his own artistic poses!
The sun was shining and it’s warm enough again for shirtsleeves! We go in search of an outdoor café to have something and enjoy the city. One of the things we quickly noticed is how drab the buildings are in Spain - M said they should have tried to make the buildings nicer.
For dinner tonight, we thought we’d try to make a dish like at home. We had found a package of taco seasoning at a shop so all we needed were the other ingredients. We couldn’t find taco shells, so we resorted to nacho chips. There was a package of mixed cheeses. We picked up something resembling salsa but in a can. A stop at the butcher across the road netted us with some “hamburger”. When it was time for dinner, the salsa ended up being something sweet and not like our salsa, the meat actually never browned and had a different taste even before the seasoning was added. Oh well even though it didn’t quite taste like home, we ate it.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 – Happy Leap year - We went back to the butcher this morning, no wonder our meat wouldn’t brown and it tasted different last night in the tacos – it’s pork, and as we read the Spanish and see the picture we realize we may have, for the first time ever, experienced actual ham - burger! Now we understand why some of the stores here have beef burger as well as hamburger - the latter is made of the famous Spanish Iberian ham! We both laughed how we had missed the picture of the pig. Now we know.
Today we’re off on the metro – a block from our apt to travel to Puerta del Sol – one of the main squares of the city. The trip takes about 15 min and as we emerge we find the square is full with people and we see many security and police, we have found our first protest! We have come upon the end of a university student protest against a hike in fees. Apparently it is one of 20 cities in the country doing this today. The country is in financial trouble, so austerity measures are being put in place. When we read the paper the next day (to the extent we can as our Spanish is limited to day the best) we learn that the protest is Barcelona had many thousands compared to the couple of hundred that were still in the square in Madrid when we got there.
Our destination today is the Palacio Real (Royal Palace) about a 10 – 15 min walk from the square. We enjoy the walk along busy streets with wonderful architecture, residential, commercial and governmental.
We even stop at a shop to pick up J a Real Madrid jersey – he has collected a few jerseys along the journey. Football (soccer to us in NA) is Europe’s passion! We also found the Museum of Ham - they sure love their ham here in Spain!
Before we reach the Palace, we visited the Cathedral Nuestra Sra De La Almudena. This church is huge and beautiful. The way it was built has loads of natural light that enhances the interior through beautiful stained glass windows. The architecture is different compared to many others we have seen, as is the interior embellishments. The ceilings are painted with designs, instead of scenes. It has the largest pipe organ we have seen so far on the trip. J remarked it’s too bad we couldn’t hear it play. It would have been magical we’re sure. Coming to these huge churches is like going to an art museum.
Next door to the Cathedral is the Royal Palace. As we come out of the cathedral there is a police escorted motorcade that goes by. We approach the palace gates to find out that it’s closed today due to a state function. Apparently we just saw the motorcade carrying King Juan Carlo I away from the building. We looked at each other and said “I didn’t know Spain still had a king…” So, we can’t visit today, we’ll come back tomorrow.
We left here and walked along the boulevard and crossed over to a garden area dedicated to soldiers of long ago. It’s a nice place to wander and there we found today’s café to stop at, have refreshments and enjoy the sun and this part of the city.
While there J found a street performer who seemed to have lost something.
Walking back to the metro stop doesn’t take long and we locate our platform for our train. It’s easier now to understand the metro systems, having taken a few in the big cities now. Back at the apartment its time for J to do homework again, then we have dinner.
Thursday, March 1, 2012 – Today we returned to Palacio Real de Madrid where we spent a couple of hours wondering this amazing palace, apparently one of the top 3 in Europe (the others being Versailles and one in Vienna). Having read up on it, billed as a must-see in Madrid we could certainly understand why. All three of us were blown away by the size and beauty of the place. It’s reported as the largest palace in Europe having 2000 decorated rooms. The audio guides we had gave us info on 22 specific rooms, and it total we likely walked through perhaps 40, so we saw 1/500th of the palace! The rooms we walked through were luxurious and breathtaking. Some of the rooms could have been in art galleries! We weren’t able to take photos, but did pick up a few post cards of some of our favorite rooms, although these photos of the postcards do not so the palace’s beauty justice.
The palace dates back to the mid 1700’s with incredible art, tapestries, sculptures, entire ceilings done in frescos, as well as wonderful antique furniture. On display were 4 Stradivarius stringed instruments valued at over 100 million euro. They are still played by world-renowned musicians today. It was an amazing visit today. As we exited the palace grounds we were shocked at how long the line up was to get into the gates. T and J high-fived each other. When we were wandering the halls of the palace there were only a handful of people and now there were all kinds of people lined up to enter. Definitely not having to jostle for a spot or navigate the crowds certainly added to the enjoyment of the afternoon tour.
Friday, March 2, 2012 – Another cultural experience for today. We took the metro down to the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (the Queen Sofia Modern Art Museum). This museum houses late 19th century to modern day contemporary art. We saw many works of Dali, Picasso, and Muri. Within the museum is Picasso’s masterpiece Guivera depicting the anguish of the bombing during Franco’s reign of northern Spain, by the Germans and the Italians. For a long time it was not allowed to be in Spain, so was in a kind of exile in New York, but has been brought back. Actually, Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain. As we wondered the halls, with an audioguide for explanations we came to have a better understanding of cubism and the effect daily life had on the presentation of art (ex. Black Spain – everything done in dark colors reflecting the time of despair in Spanish history compared to the White Spain, more colorful and happier times). Even though we had explanations and some artists are considered masters, we still would say we don’t appreciate their work or why some artists have become so famous, since sometimes a piece is a couple of squiggly lines on a painted background!
It was the first time we had seen so many of Picasso works and we could say, some are out there! We saw a couple that we have seen pictures of in art books. We also saw more Dali’s than we have seen before, and recognize that the three Dali’s that M bought many years ago are among his less out there works. All three of us enjoyed the visit, but have come to the conclusion, that some of the styles presented in the museum today, aren’t what we enjoy. But, it’s an education, nevertheless.
After dinner and J’s movie, as we will not have Internet for the next two weeks at our apartments, M stayed up late and did another blog post before heading to bed.
Saturday, March 3, 2012 – Our last full day in Madrid and we’re off to check out one of the main parks in the city. We took the metro down to yesterday’s stop. We walked in the opposite direction and soon came to the area bordering the botanical gardens and then along a pedestrian only road to the park.
There are all kinds of people sitting on the grass or on benches, exercising, and just enjoying this huge green space. This park, Buen Retiro, has been around since the 1800’s when it was a park for the Spanish monarchy and then later made available for the public. It is a wonderful haven within this Spanish capital of 3.3 million people. We stopped to watch some soccer being played by boys about J’s age, as well as admired the beauty of the grounds. There are fountains, statues, flower gardens, and a maze of walkways within this city refuge.
Must be quite something in the summer with the gardens in bloom and all the trees with leaves. Within this park is a memorial of 191 trees for the victims of a terrorist attack at a number of subway stations in March 2004 – their memory lives on….
We had to make a stop at a mall to see if M could get his glasses repaired – a bit of a mishap with J… We stopped at El Corte Ingles, a department store the likes of Macy’s or Nordstrum’s and were fortunate to find an optical shop that put them back together free of charge – crisis adverted! A great store, with six floors of merchandise, from the budget to higher end designer wear. Alas, it’s not the day to shop for T…
We walked back to the apt, a 40 or so min walk.
We stopped for a coffee break near our place and enjoyed getting off of our feet. After getting ready for tomorrow’s departure, we went out for dinner. Even though it was 7 pm we were too early, dinner wasn’t going to be served until 8. We debated and decided to go to the Mercando supermarket, around the corner and pick up a couple of things and return to the apt. Groceries cost just over 6 Euro, dinner at the restaurant would have been 45, so saved time and money!
This week we didn’t have any English TV, but did have a music video channel for entertainment. Through the week we listened and commented on songs we liked, and tonight, M downloaded a bunch of tunes to add to our collection. We have come to realize, we really are not up to the current music scene and who is popular, before this week we weren’t really familiar with Coldplay or Snow Patrol, Bruno Mars or Adele, although we recognized their songs but could definitely not have identified the artist’s name.
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